


last days of summer

by crickets



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-03
Updated: 2011-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:16:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets





	last days of summer

Caroline is going to live forever, or somewhere pretty close to it anyway, so it strikes her as odd, one summer night at the Grill, when she's overcome by the feeling that she's running out of time. Stefan is dark and tense and he keeps clenching his jaw all night. Caroline is pretty sure she doesn't want to know what's on his mind. She hopes he simply senses her own uneasiness. The more time they spend together, the more their moods tend to match. Caroline makes an E.T. joke now and then, but never asks whether this is a "vampire" thing or just a "them" thing. She suspects it's a little of both.

She orders curly fries and Tyler sits between them in the booth. He leans his shoulder lazily into Stefan's once he's had a few beers, kisses Caroline on the mouth. She can see his hand resting on Stefan's knee from her position. It's not a view meant for anyone else.

Later, after Jeremy shows up, a friendly game of pool turns sour and Jeremy ends up with a busted fist and Tyler, belly full of alcohol, his heightened wolf senses muted, ends up with a bloody nose.

Stefan bites his bottom lip, his arms crossed, the scent of Tyler's blood filling his nostrils. Caroline gives his elbow a quick squeeze and then moves to put herself in the middle of the already dying scuffle. "Guys, would you give it a rest?" Caroline insists. She grabs Jeremy's fist and holds it up to inspect it. "You better go put some ice on that, Gilbert." She doesn't mention the kind of damaging force it must have taken his human fist to injure Tyler so significantly, and she doesn't have to. He's well aware of that fact, and has suffered more than a couple of broken bones learning it repeatedly.

Jeremy just nods and heads toward the bar, muttering an apology and a half-hearted, "I know, I know."

"And you," she takes Tyler's face in both of her hands. "What are we gonna do with you?" She looks back at Stefan and shakes her head. Stefan just shrugs, his hands in his pockets, even less surprised by the skirmish than she is. Caroline never quite understood why Tyler and Jeremy could never manage to work out their differences. It's been a long time since Vicki Donovan sparked this, what seems like ancient, rivalry. Caroline senses the mutual respect between them, but despite it, they always manage to come to blows. Somehow she knows that will never change.

"Hopeless," she says.

\--

Back at the boarding house, Caroline tosses a hot rag to Tyler so he can clean his already-healed nose. Tyler looks down at the blood on his shirt and removes the offending garment, chucking it into the laundry basket. The two of them return from the bathroom to find Stefan sitting comfortably against the headboard of his unmade bed, watching the television set that Caroline had to beg him to install. They both climb in with him, Caroline curling up next to Stefan, her head on his shoulder, and Tyler leaning back, propping himself up with his hands behind his head in Caroline's lap.

"This is an old one," Caroline smiles.

"I haven't seen it," Tyler says.

"It's impossible, though," Stefan notes. "They'll need a lot more velocity to ever get it to work. No human could ever generate that kind of speed unaided. This myth's busted."

"Shh!" Caroline elbows him. "You'll spoil the surprise for Tyler."

Tyler leans back far enough to look at the both of them. "Thanks a lot guys."

Caroline thumps him on the nose where Jeremy likely broke it earlier, and Tyler pulls her down for a kiss.

"I still say we should move to Hollywood under assumed names and become stunt people," she says after a while. "We'd be awesome at it."

They watch the whole episode anyway.

\--

Caroline has learned to appreciate the things she has. She understands that just when things can't get worse, they do. And so these times when they're together, the three of them, safe and relatively happy - spats with the townsfolk notwithstanding - they're special. They have Stefan back, for good this time. And that's worth more than she can say.

After escaping from Klaus, with the help of Damon and Bonnie, Stefan had come back different. Damon died a hero, and Stefan was left completely unable to pick up the pieces. So Caroline was there. After all he'd done? _She owed him that._ She helped him put himself back together, without his brother, without Elena. And Tyler was there too. So now? It's the three of them. End of story.

Stefan's bloodlust probably won't subside for another fifty years she suspects. She can sense it in the way he moves, the way his breath catches in his throat when Tyler's blood pressure rises even fractionally.

When this all began, when they forged their little pseudo family, she never imagined how bad Stefan could get until she saw it for herself. Before then? It was all just a theoretical nightmare. Not a real one.

 _Until it was._

One night, she came home late and found the two of them in one of the guest bedrooms. What she knows is very little, but it is this: things had gotten out of control, as they sometimes do when the wolf and the vampire fall into bed alone, with Caroline missing from the equation. At some point, Tyler cut himself on a broken shard of glass, and when _she_ finally showed up, Stefan was on top of him, his fangs at Tyler's throat from behind, blood everywhere, down Tyler's back, on the bed, across Stefan's chin and bare chest. The worst part is that Stefan was still driving into a barely conscious Tyler from behind, thrusting his hips into the weakened wolf, unable to discern the hunt from sex, unable to stop himself from drinking, from fucking, from practically killing Tyler in the process. Tyler had called for her when he heard her come in the front door and the terrified sound her name made as it escaped his throat was unlike anything she'd ever heard.

Luckily she'd been able to stop Stefan that time. And it took months for Tyler to be able to look Stefan in the face again, let alone trust him.

Afterward, that same night, with Stefan locked safely away and Tyler's werewolf healing powers aided by Caroline's blood, she offers to turn him. "You won't have to be afraid. We can be together. If Klaus is any example, you'll never have to turn again, not even on a full moon. It'd be like... _you're not even a werewolf anymore._ And Stefan..." she trails off.

"I'll still be a vampire, Caroline," Tyler says. "And we don't even know if it's possible. I just. I don't know yet. Especially after... I just don't know anything anymore, okay?"

Caroline reaches for him and pulls him into a kiss, but Tyler is already making his way to the door, so the connection is brief.

She resists the urge to ask him not to go, and Tyler promises he'll be back, as if he heard her words without her having to utter them. "I don't know when," he says. "But I do promise."

\--

She remembers long afterward, the two of them watching Stefan sleep by the fire, an uncharacteristic blizzard raging outside. In reality, because of their supernatural capabilities, they both know they don't have to stay there with him at the boarding house, despite the fact that the human population of Mystic Falls has been snowed in for days. But they do anyway. And Caroline can still smell Tyler's fear coming off of him in waves every time the vampire stirs. Tyler hasn't stayed the night since that summer, and now it's been two in a row, and his uneasiness is finally peeking through.

"You don't have to stay you know," Caroline clutches his hand. Runs her fingers through his too-long winter hair.

"I do," he says and there's a sense of resolved guilt in his voice that Caroline doesn't understand until a little while later, when Tyler tells her it was his idea in the first place. His voice doesn't break when he tells the story, giving her the details she has always wondered about but had been too polite to ask for. He tells her how Stefan's eyes had reddened when the blood dripped from his hand and how Tyler, not even thinking, held his bloody fist to Stefan's lips, letting him have the taste he so obviously craved. It was quick, barely a minute before the wound started to heal. Later, when Stefan had him on his knees, taking Tyler from behind, the wolf had reached back and grabbed Stefan by the neck, bringing his fangs to his skin. "Drink." he had told him. _Commanded him._ And Stefan, already drunk with Tyler's blood in his belly, the taste of it still on his tongue, sunk his teeth into Tyler's flesh before bothering to warn him just what a bad idea this all was.

The truth though? Was that the warning was already at the back of Tyler's mind, but in his haze of lust and pleasure, Tyler chose to ignore it.

"It was my fault," he says finally. "I knew what I was doing... I knew he wasn't ready, Caroline. I just... I was stupid."

"No, no," Caroline tugs at his collar, forcing him to look into her eyes. " _No._ "

But the thing is, Caroline can't reassure him any more than she can reassure herself. _Or_ Stefan, for that matter. There it is, plain as anything. Caroline blames herself. Tyler blames himself. And Stefan blames himself most of all. Neither of them are particularly wrong. She doesn't think it's strange that nobody blames Klaus. Klaus is long dead, anyway, and she thinks that maybe this was all inevitable to begin with.

Across from them on the couch, both she and Tyler become aware that Stefan is now awake, listening intently, eyes trained on the ceiling.

" _A vampire, is a vampire, is a vampire._ "

Caroline says the words out loud to Tyler, to Stefan, to herself. And they come out soft and ringing of truth. She never tells them how afraid she is of learning that the hard way, how afraid she is of meeting that side of herself that she knows has the potential to emerge at any time. And the way they look at her by the light of the fire tells her she doesn't have to.

 _They already know._

\--

It's during that blizzard that Tyler finally returns to their bed; the three of them again at last.

Stefan kisses Tyler in a way that makes Caroline envious, searching and slow and with a tenderness that makes the tips of her fingers involuntarily reach out for them. She runs a hand over Stefan's shoulder and back, threads her fingers through Tyler's hair until she comes to tug lightly on his earlobe, knowing what kind of reaction that causes in Tyler's body. Caroline can almost smell Elena's memory in the room, and she knows this is the kind of gentleness that Stefan had reserved only for her, knows it's emerging now in an effort to win Tyler's trust, to prove that nothing like what happened that summer will ever happen again.

Caroline is there, between them, when she needs to be. She remembers tracing her fingers over Stefan's spine, tasting that evening's wine on his lips, and feeling Tyler's hands circling her waist, his lips at her neck. They move so slowly that the candlelight burns down into a smoky black wick and she has to rely on her heightened sight to see. Finally she just closes her eyes, using her sense of touch to make her way through their murky dance, the sound of hitched breaths and sucking mouths and eager gasps accompanying them through to the morning.

The next day, the snow begins to melt, and Caroline finds it oddly fitting -- _an end to the storm._

The three of them spend the day in the bed, wrapped in each other and Stefan's soft bedding.

"This is perfect," she remembers one of them saying.

"Perfect," she echoes.

\--

Now, this late and humid summer night, a year having come and gone, Caroline curled up with the two of them, still dressed in her dinner outfit, she's reminded of that day and how she felt safe and comfortable and warm and positively at home.

Tyler gently nips at her earlobe, his arms wrapped around her from behind, and Stefan finally turns off the television, settling down next to them.

"Goodnight," Caroline mutters, pulling the covers over them.

"Goodnight," her two suitors respond in unison.

Caroline's mouth spreads into a sleepy smile that would have produced a giggle were she more awake.

\--

That night, when she dreams, she dreams of a journey ahead. She dreams of cities with not a single familiar face, she dreams of empty train cars and abandoned airports, and empty highways. In this dreamscape, she is always acutely aware of one thing: _She is alone._ It is only the very real sensation of Tyler's warmth surrounding her in the bed, of Stefan's strong embrace, that allow her to feel unafraid

But in her dreams? They are nowhere to be found, and all she can hear is the sound of clocks ticking.

\--

It isn't yet dawn when Caroline wakes to find Stefan standing in front of his open curtains. The tension in his back has returned and she slips behind him, sliding her cool hands over the taut skin.

Stefan leans into the touch.

"It's time for us to go, Caroline," he says after a few minutes, the blue early morning light from the window threatening to turn bright white at any moment.

"Go?" Caroline asks instinctively, but the second the word comes out of her mouth, _she knows_. " _Oh_ ," she says. _Of course_. This is what's been bothering him for the past several days.

 _Their time in Mystic Falls has come to an end._

She remembers him telling her about this inevitability when she first turned. But she'd never fully embraced the idea to tell the truth. She'd pushed the thought to the back of her mind and just hoped it would be a long, long, time before her immortality became something she could no longer ignore. She'd been kidding herself. There are still only a handful of people in the Falls that know about her, and anyone else with a keen eye and enough interest would know something was not quite right by now. Until this point, they'd been lucky. No one seemed to really care enough to notice. But that kind of luck doesn't last forever. And Caroline knows he's right.

"And Tyler?" she asks solemnly.

"He'll come with us, of course," Stefan says. "Assuming he wants to."

Caroline can hear the guilt and skepticism in Stefan's voice, and reaches up to place a reassuring hand across the back of his neck.

"He wants to," Caroline assures him.

\--

Alaric Saltzman is more than happy to keep the grounds for them for the next several dozen years or so, and by the end of the week, everything is arranged.

That last day, Caroline and Stefan go out for one last hunt in _their woods_ , and Caroline can smell autumn in the air after their kill.

"Summer's ending," she says, and realizes that so too, is her old life. _For good this time._ No more pretending.

"So it is," Stefan agrees, and casts his eyes toward the house, no doubt looking for Tyler.

Caroline reaches around him, snakes her hand into his front pants pocket on the opposite side. "He'll be here," she says with a confidence that makes Stefan believe it must be true.

He leans over to kiss her, and when he does, his eyes closed, his hands cradling her head, he can hear the distinct sound of a motorcycle in the distance.

Caroline smiles into his kiss. "Told you," she says.

Stefan makes a face, amusement and relief flashing across his features, and he presses his forehead to Caroline's. "I should have listened."

When Tyler finally calls for them from the yard, they're already halfway there.

 _-fin_


End file.
